Apex Legends
While I appreciate Apex Legends as a fun battle royale title, it also operates as one of the last bastions of crazily over-monetized titles on the market, perhaps no surprise, given that it’s coming from EA. Apex Legends has already combined a storefront with a battle pass and loot boxes, and now their latest move may have pushed some fans too far.
Apex Legends has just started an Iron Crown event in which they’ve introduced Solos as a limited time mode, among other things. But the main purpose is to sell a new slate of items within the battle pass season.
It’s not unheard of, Fortnite does this for special events which offer unique cosmetics for sale during a season, and yet the way Apex is going about this is the problem.
It’s not just that there are a bunch of new (very good) skins for sale in the store, it’s that the entire collection, 12 epic and 12 legendary items, are parceled into 24 loot boxes. Fine, you say, it’s a mini battle pass with some randomization that players can grind for, sort of like Overwatch or The Division 2.
Hard nope.
You can only grind out two of the 24 loot boxes through challenges. The rest you will literally have to buy, and they cost $7 a piece, so that’s $160, if you’re buying currency in bulk. As icing on the cake, there’s a new heirloom axe that you can only get once you have every other item in the collection, and that costs 3,500 Apex Coins itself. In total, if you want everything in this collection it costs a minimum of $170 and with no alternative option to grind for 95% of it.
What is going on here
In an age when almost all big games are shifting away from loot boxes in some form or another, it is wild to see Apex Legends going this hard on them. Yes, a $7 loot box for a 50% shot at a legendary skin is less than an $18 legendary skin costs to buy outright, and yet with the randomization, you don’t know whether you’ll get what you want after $7 or $160. This is literally the reason everyone hates loot boxes and feel they’re awful and exploitative. It’s why Fortnite doesn’t have them and other games like Destiny are veering away from them. I thought it was funny enough when Apex was putting loot boxes as reward tiers in its battle pass, micortransactions within microtransactions, but this event is well beyond that, and EA, because it’s surely EA pulling these strings, not Respawn, needs to dramatically rethink how they’re monetizing this game.
Unlike Fortnite, which routinely bends to the whims of its community whenever they complain about anything, EA is less likely to be flexible than Epic when it comes to something like this. But the Iron Crown Collection is so egregious that I have to believe that something will change with it, though perhaps only if EA sees that it’s not selling as many loot boxes as they’d like. And if it is, well, look for more cash grabs like this in the future.
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